Question

What would be the best method of moving any element of an associative array to the beginning of the array?

For example, say I have the following array:

$myArray = array(
    'two'   => 'Blah Blah Blah 2',
    'three' => 'Blah Blah Blah 3',
    'one'   => 'Blah Blah Blah 1',
    'four'  => 'Blah Blah Blah 4',
    'five'  => 'Blah Blah Blah 5',
);

What i want to do is move the ‘one’ element to the beginning and end up with the following array:

$myArray = array(
    'one'   => 'Blah Blah Blah 1',
    'two'   => 'Blah Blah Blah 2',
    'three' => 'Blah Blah Blah 3',
    'four'  => 'Blah Blah Blah 4',
    'five'  => 'Blah Blah Blah 5',
);

Answer 1

You can use the array union operator (+) to join the original array to a new associative array using the known key (one).

$myArray = array('one' => $myArray['one']) + $myArray;
// or      ['one' => $myArray['one']] + $myArray;

Array keys are unique, so it would be impossible for it to exist in two locations.

See further at the doc on Array Operators:

The + operator returns the right-hand array appended to the left-hand array; for keys that exist in both arrays, the elements from the left-hand array will be used, and the matching elements from the right-hand array will be ignored.